MISSION STATEMENTThe Pitt Rivers Museum aspires to be the best university museum of anthropology and archaeology in the world, using its unique galleries as a focus for exemplary teaching and research and as an inspirational forum for the sharing of cultural knowledge among the widest possible public

The Visitors of the Pitt Rivers Museum, having received from the Director the following report for the period 1 August 2004 to 31 July 2005, presented it as its report to Congregation.

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTIONThis has been another year of great activity and considerable accomplishment despite the temporarily dispersed state of the Museum’s staff and facilities. The dispersal, of course, is a consequence of the demolition of the rear of the museum (where many of us had had our offices) and is a necessary prelude to constructing the major new extension. I am writing this in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History whose Director has generously provided accommodation for me and some of my colleagues. Others are housed in Central Chemistry; the Museum’s library has migrated temporarily to the Old Boy’s School in George Street, under Mark Dickerson’s quietly effective stewardship; most of the collections section has moved to 60 Banbury Road; while the team working on the ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project, supported by the Designation Challenge Fund, is housed in the Museum’s lower gallery, which—like the upper gallery—has been closed to the public since the beginning of the year.

None of this has made for easy working conditions, and it is a great tribute to my colleagues that the Museum has nevertheless continued to function so smoothly. For an inherently tricky operation, the early stages of the building programme have gone smoothly too—so far, at least. Earlier in the year, the University made the very welcome decision that the Museum’s new extension was to be funded in its entirety, rather than being completed in two phases. There are immense advantages to this, albeit bitter-sweet ones insofar as we are asked to vacate not only 64 Banbury Road but also 60 Banbury Road and the attached Balfour Galleries. The firm of Sir Robert McAlpine has been appointed to construct the new extension. As with ‘our’ architectural practice, Pringle Richards Sharratt, McAlpine’s staff have shown themselves both consultative and solicitous in undertaking major building work in such close proximity to the galleries. In particular, we have been relieved at how smoothly the external half of the Museum’s stone staircase was demolished without unduly registering on the vibration monitors that Birgitte Speake, the Museum’s Head of Conservation, and her team have installed in the adjacent galleries. This year, we must make special mention of both Birgitte’s conservation team and John Simmons and his technical services team for their intensive effort in dismounting some 1700 artefacts from the Museum’s displays in the vicinity of the areas that had to be demolished; the technical team also moved the Museum shop to the other side of the entrance staircase in preparation for the building work.

But the achievements this year have extended well beyond merely maintaining a reasonably normal service and averting building disasters. I am very happy to have been proven pessimistic in the fear I expressed in last year’s report that the number of visitors received then (155,000) was likely to be a high-water mark given the disruptions to be caused by the building work. In fact, visitor numbers have increased this year by a further 9% to more than 169,000, assisted in part by a two-hour extension of Sunday opening hours from the start of the calendar year. Virtual visitor numbers are also up by 26% to 326,000 individuals; this should be boosted further in future years as a number of websites associated with current research projects are launched.

One of the year’s high-spots was the evening opening, held jointly with the Museum of Natural History (but whose moving spirit was Kate White, the Pitt Rivers’s Marketing and Visitor Services Officer), as the museums’ contribution to Museums and Galleries Month (MGM). Lights in the Pitt Rivers were extinguished and torches (battery-operated!) issued so that the hundreds of visitors who queued to enter the Museum literally saw it ‘In a Different Light’ (the title of the special evening). The event was one of ten such short-listed for Museums Journal/MGM commendations. The culmination of much such work over recent years was the Museum’s winning (jointly with the Museum of Natural History) of the ‘Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award 2005’, judged by a panel of children. The short-listing panel included the Chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund and Dea Birkett, the award’s founder, who said: ‘If you go there on a Sunday afternoon, you can hardly see the floor for families—from toddlers to grandparents—sprawled all over it, working together, doing jigsaws, drawing, tracing...it’s as if the museum belongs to the young visitors.’ The award is a testament to how welcoming the museums are and a great and well-merited tribute to the Museum’s education, front-of-house, and shop staff.

The fact that over the year Museum staff have also continued to run a million pounds’ worth of collections-related research projects demonstrates that the more academic dimension of university museum work has not been neglected either. In addition to the ongoing research projects outlined in the body of this report, the Museum was fortunate to be allocated one of the University’s three-year HEFCE-funded Career Development Fellowships, which was awarded to Dr Christopher Morton for a collections-based research project focusing upon the E.E. Evans-Pritchard photograph collection from Southern Sudan. In addition, Dr Laura Peers was offered a substantial award from the Leverhulme Trust for a project based on the Museum’s noted Beechey–Belcher collection from the Arctic; due to the nominated researcher securing a position elsewhere, however, the future of the project is uncertain. The currently dispersed state of museum staff and the diversion of effort into building planning have led to a decrease in the number of applications for research grants made this year, and grant income will thus inevitably tail off in the coming years as projects are completed. Over the course of a number of ‘away-days’, therefore, senior staff mapped out a timetable for future grant applications. We will be infinitely better placed to accommodate research projects in the new extension, and are now very practised at applying for and running them; though success in obtaining them will of course depend on the continued availability of funding. Such projects may well involve further collaboration with other institutions. The current ‘Tibet Visual History’ project is being run in collaboration with the British Museum, and this year the Museum worked with the British Museum and the National Maritime Museum (NMM) in organizing a research workshop at the NMM on ‘Collecting Artefacts, Acquiring Empire: A Maritime Endeavour’. We look forward to developing more such inter- institutional projects in the future.

Other grants and donations received this year relate directly to the construction of the new extension. The DCMS/Wolfson Foundation’s Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund granted £70,000 for the exhibition cases in period style needed where the new extension intersects with the existing galleries. We must now energetically seek the required 34% partnership funding without calling on the Museum’s very small reserves. With great generosity, the Museum’s Friends have committed themselves to raising part of this and with equal generosity, one of their patrons, Michael Palin, has agreed to sponsor a new staff post for a year to assist with the display work needed to fill the cases. One of the priorities for the Museum when staff are established in the extra space provided by the new extension will be to fund and set up a Development Office to provide an additional source of support and independence.

One further and growing source of support is the government’s ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ programme, which already funds an education officer in each of the Oxford University museums. As one of the ‘Phase 2 Hubs’ under ‘Renaissance’, we were very pleased to learn that we can bid corporately for enhanced hub funding from 2006. The Ashmolean’s Professor Mayhew and myself (who jointly lead for the University on this issue) have spent a good deal of time constructing the necessary business plan, but have been very heavily dependent in this on the flair and energy of my Executive Research Assistant, Dr John Hobart.

Greatly welcome though the additional hub funding prospectively is, our main external funder remains the Arts and Humanities Research Council, under whose Core Funding Scheme the Museum currently receives some £600,000 a year. Since we have found the AHRC core-funding competition to be admirably light touch and responsive, we were disappointed to learn that the next round will be for three rather than five years, after which the funding scheme will revert to HEFCE. We therefore spent much time endeavouring to ensure that the Museum’s bid for the AHRC’s final round of core funding for 2006–9 is as strong as possible and reflects the additional opportunities that the new extension will offer. No less important to the Museum’s well-being are the energies of the Museum’s enthusiastic Friends and volunteers, and the support of its benefactors. Here I would especially like to thank Richard Briant, as Chairman of the Museum’s Friends, and William Delafield and Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey for their long-term backing.

The Museum was sad to hear that Paul Unsworth, Adminstrative Secretary and Librarian of the Museum from 1961 to 1980, died during the year. He made a major contribution to the work of the Museum for more than eighteen years and maintained strong links with it thereafter. He was also a staunch supporter of the Museum’s Friends, especially during their early years.

Finally, warm congratulations must be offered to Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and to the Chairman of the Visitors of the Museum, John Landers. After many years’ service, during which she has greatly raised the profile of the Museum’s photograph collection, Elizabeth leaves us to take up a research professorship at University of the Arts London. Meanwhile, Professor Gosden has been made a Fellow of the British Academy and Dr Landers has been appointed Principal of Hertford. I salute all three in particular, but also all my other colleagues who have made this yet another successful year for the Museum.

ACCESSThe major focus for work this year has been the development of the new extension, including inputting into the design to ensure it becomes an accessible, functional, and sympathetic addition to the Museum’s public space, as well as accommodating collections, research, and teaching activities. Other major concerns this year were the management of the public and press announcements relating to the closure of the galleries, which generally met with interest, acceptance, and support, and research and initial planning for the opening and public launch of the new extension.

The year started with a new Designation Challenge Fund (DCF) project, ‘What’s Upstairs?’, on which Bryony Reid was appointed to take forward the interpretation strategy begun during the DCF-funded ‘Court Project’. This work has included the in-house production of a new case-by-case audio guide. By July, with the help of Hélène La Rue, four members of staff had recorded forty entries for the new guide. Other entries will be added in due course. Indeed, the new technology is much more adaptable and opens up new and creative possibilities for incorporating other voices into the interpretation of the collections in the future.

Analysis of the 2003–4 joint OUMNH/PRM visitor survey provided evidence that the museums are very successful at attracting young families (nearly half the number of independent visitors fall into this group). More attention now needs to be given to the over 55s. Relatively few visits are made by single persons, museum visiting having become a social, leisure-time activity. Unsurprisingly, large numbers of visitors are well educated, but there are interesting indicators of the differences in the audiences the two museums attract; for example, current students tend to spend more of their time in the Pitt Rivers, while those without higher-education qualifications tend to spend more time with the natural history displays. (Similar findings were explored in greater detail in research carried out by MORI and ACORN under the ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ programme in late 2004.) In the coming year, and in the lead-up to the opening of the new extension, we will be developing ways of reaching and encouraging new audiences from more varied backgrounds, such as those from more rural communities beyond the city’s ring road.

The local popularity of the Museum was confirmed by the ‘Visitor Attractions in Oxford Survey 2004’. This research, carried out by the City, reported on key findings relating to visitor attractions in Oxford. The aim of the survey was to gain an understanding of Oxford City residents’ perceptions of tourism in Oxford—the first time such a detailed survey has been conducted. The Pitt Rivers was voted the second most popular attraction, after Christ Church. Such public recognition and approval of the Museum is regularly expressed in the comments book, which highlights the important role front-of-house staff play in visitors’ enjoyment of the Museum. In July there was public recognition of the work of the education and front-of-house teams when the Museum was awarded, jointly with the Museum of Natural History, the ‘Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award 2005’.

Education ServicesThe Museum’s education service continued to grow through the year, both in numbers of staff and volunteers and in the number of children and adults taking part in organized activities. The volunteer guides continued to deliver tours around the Museum to primary school children. This year Joan Shaw, Jean Flemming, Frances Martyn, Rosemary Lee, Alan Lacey, Margaret Dyke, Linda Teasdale, and Jeannine Batstone were joined by Suki Christianson and Ann Phythian-Adams; though the team were sorry to lose Barbara Topley and Johnny Acton, both of whom moved away during the year.

Hands-on workshops for schools and family activities were delivered by Andy McLellan, Isabelle Carré, and Becca McVean, supported by some 150 volunteers (a huge number) whose efforts were co-ordinated by Joy Todd, who organizes volunteers across the University’s museums. The education service was supported by a wide range of museum staff, particularly the conservators who contributed greatly to such school projects as ‘Making Museums’. Some new sessions were also introduced this year, including a collaborative project between the Bate Collection and the Pitt Rivers in which children spend half a day learning to play the Javanese gamelan with the afternoon spent in the museum looking at shadow puppets and aspects of Indonesian culture. Other projects have included ‘Imagine’, a large art project developed in conjunction with eight museums across Oxfordshire; training for 300 student teachers; joint art sessions with the Ashmolean; a week- long gamelan residency at Oxfordshire County Council’s Centre for Music; and an HLF- funded film project with African teenagers in Oxford.

Although the lower and upper galleries have been closed because of the building work, more than 21,000 children visited the Museum during the year in booked groups, with more than 7,500 taking part in taught sessions. Family activities also continued to expand and it is now very rare for a family workshop to attract less than a hundred children, with the result that something in the region of 9,000 children took part in free drop-in activities during the course of the year. These activities included making kites and flying them on the lawn in front of the Museum of Natural History, object handling in the Pitt Rivers, making flowers and hats at the Cowley Road Carnival, and the ever-popular Family Friendly Sundays. With the work of the education service becoming increasingly well known, both locally and nationally (not least, of course, through winning the ‘Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award 2005’), education staff look forward to an even busier year in 2005–6.

Visitor NumbersVisitor figures rose by 9.1% to 169,158 (from 155,083 in 2004–5), which—given the continuing competition from other attractions and free national museums—is an excellent result. This was a far greater rise than in the previous year and may result from a combination of a number of factors: the extra opening hours on Sundays (from January 2005), the increased local publicity the Museum received in connection with news of the new extension, and the highly successful Family Friendly activities. The numbers of booked groups visiting the Museum decreased by 14.5% to 607 (from 710 in 2004–5); however, underlying this is a fall of only 2.5% to 21,308 in the number of individuals visiting in booked groups. Despite these decreases, the number of taught sessions continues to rise steadily, with an increase of 6.5% to 231 groups made up of 7,685 individuals, an increase that reflects the Museum’s drive towards an ever-improving quality of visit for schools. The number of virtual visitors to the website rose by 26% to more than 326,000 individuals from 158 countries. Of these visitors, 9.4 % ‘bookmarked’ the site, an increase of 446% on the previous year.

Events and ActivitiesThe Museum continued its active role in the community through participation in community events, educational outreach, and Family Friendly events and activities. This work was mostly carried out by education staff, but would not have been possible without the support of the Friends, education staff at the Museum of Natural History, and the volunteer coordinator Joy Todd along with her team of volunteers.

On a Saturday afternoon in November, Keith Waithe (flute and vocal gymnastics) and Jo Jo Yates (kora) gave a concert in the Museum, organized in partnership with Oxford Contemporary Music. They provided an atmospheric performance amongst the displays of musical instruments, preceded by a demonstration of the variety of sounds made by flutes from around the world, and by the human voice. The enthusiastic crowd participated in mass humming and other vocal gymnastics.

The increasingly close cooperation between the Pitt Rivers and the Museum of Natural History was best expressed on 14 May when, as part of Museums and Galleries Month, ‘In a Different Light’ was presented. This joint evening event, with the Museum of Natural History and the Bate collection, was organized as part of the European-wide ‘Nuits des Musées’. The event began in the afternoon when 30 young visitors were able to join in playing the gongs and metallophones of the Javanese gamelan orchestra in a free ‘taster’ session. The gamelan theme continued in the evening with the Oxford Gamalan Orchestra providing musical accompaniment to a performance of Javanese court dances by Ni Madé Pujawati. Along with many other activities, including a demonstration of Indonesian shadow- puppets and a screening of the original 1925 film of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, the Museum of Natural History was lit by swirling coloured lights while the Pitt Rivers Museum’s lights were turned off to allow people to explore the museum by torchlight. The gamelan and evening opening proved tremendously popular, drawing many young adults and Asian visitors as well as, surprisingly, given the late hour, a number of families with young children. More than 700 visitors queued to visit the Pitt Rivers, while some 1500 attended the evening as a whole.

At the end of May the Friends provided guided tours to some ‘Objects of Desire’. These guided tours were very well attended and the feedback was very positive. It is hoped to provide more activities like this for adults in the future. Visitors were encouraged to complete and display cards identifying their own favourite objects, and the space made available for them rapidly filled up.

In June, to mark the start of the building work, the ‘Inspector Morse’ author Colin Dexter was invited to oversee the burial of a time-capsule beneath the foundations of the extension. The burial of the capsule, containing objects contributed by children from Rosehill Primary School and members of staff, was witnessed by the school children as the culmination of a series of education activities and visits in which they were asked to imagine what the world would be like in the future.

ICTIn response to the needs of staff dispersed over a number of sites as part of the enabling works for the new extension, the Museum’s network was expanded again this year. In addition, the wireless network within the Museum was expanded to encompass the upper gallery, with further development of the subnet link to the University’s backbone network. An email terminal was provided for the Museum’s attendants and a printer provided for the computer terminal housed in the Museum giving public access to the records on the collections database for the objects on display. Other areas in which progress has been made include: the setting-up of a pilot project as the first step towards the creation of an image bank to manage the Museum’s digital assets; the implementation of a Raid file storage system for housing the images generated by the various research projects; the updating of operating systems on all staff machines to MacOSX and WindowsXP where appropriate; the formulation of a digital scanning policy; the completion of the University’s IT metrics survey; and the digitization of the new audio guides. The year ahead is set to be equally dynamic: investigating new technologies, such as remote desktop access; automatic virus updates; cross-platform file sharing; implementation of the image bank; the rolling out of new versions of the collections databases; and the launch of the new Museum website.

Following the successful completion of the project to catalogue the Thesiger photographic collection, the new entries were incorporated into the main database and are now available online. In addition a web gallery of some of the images in the collection was made available via the Museum’s website. The ICT Officer also supported the DCF-funded ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project and made improvements to the online accessibility of the ‘Forster Collection’ and associated ‘Pacific Pathways’ site. In May, David Harris took up the temporary post of ICT Projects Officer to work on the IT components of the Museum’s three major research projects: ‘The Relational Museum’, ‘The Visual History of Tibet’, and ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan’. In due course, each project will have a dedicated website providing access to the Museum’s collections and records.

The number of visitors to the website continued to grow, with a 26% increase in individuals, to around 326,000, while the percentage of visitors who bookmark the site more than quadrupled over the period. The Museum’s website continues to expand, with updates and additions to most of its sections. This year, the education pages were revamped with new trails and additional collection-based fact-sheets; in addition, the Museum’s annual report was made available as well as interim project reports, the disability access booklet and trail, and the Museum’s DDA statement. News of special exhibitions, projects, and events continued to be provided, as well as information for visitors concerning the new extension and the impact of building work. The Museum’s web development working group is currently in the process of formulating the navigation layers that will shape the Museum’s new website, which will come into effect in the early part of next year and will be fully compliant with W3C accessibility guidelines.

DISPLAYPermanent DisplaysNo new permanent display was mounted during the year. Indeed, preparations for the impending building works involved the dismantling of a number of displays, and of some actual cases as well, around the ‘old’ stairwell and lift shaft on all three floors of the Museum. It also proved necessary to remove a number of objects from other, adjacent displays as a precaution against possible vibration. Moreover, in December 2004 and January 2005 respectively, the upper and lower galleries had to be closed to the public, both because of the building work and because of the need to store objects removed from display. Thankfully, however, it has been possible to keep the court open throughout this disruptive time and the Museum’s visitors have been very understanding of the limited access and slightly altered displays.

At the end of the reporting year, the Museum was delighted to hear that it had been successful in its application to the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund for a grant of £70,000. This money will be used to reconstruct the dismantled display cases and to build and install new cases in the area of the old lift-shaft. As has been the Museum’s practice in recent years, the new cases will be designed and built to resemble the much-loved cases that are most characteristic of the Museum. Plans are already in place to reinstall enhanced versions of the dismantled displays and to mount complementary displays in the new cases.

Special ExhibitionsThe Museum’s special exhibition programme was severely reduced this year due to the building works; not only did the new photo-case become unavailable when the lower gallery closed in January, but Museum staff were hard pressed preparing for the building works. Nevertheless, the programme did continue in reduced form.

Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936–1947 continued in the main special exhibition space until 30 November 2004 (see previous report for details). It was followed by Wilfred Thesiger’s Iraq, 1949–1958: Photographs of Travel, which opened on 18 December 2004 and will continue into 2006. This exhibition is a revised version of the exhibition that the Museum, in collaboration with the National Trust, mounted from 28 July to 31 October 2004 at the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock, where it attracted some 30,000 visitors. Comprising fifty photographs alongside original albums and photographic ephemera, the exhibition has also proved extremely popular in Oxford, with many visitors making a special visit to the Museum to see it.

In the new photo-case Congo Journey: Photographs and Documents from Robert Hottot’s Expedition to Central Africa, 1908–1909 continued until 26 September. Curated by Philip Grover and Chris Morton, the exhibition displayed glass stereo photographs, maps, documents, and equipment from this important, but previously under-researched, collection. This was followed by Photo-Icons: Religious Images from Romania, which illustrated how icons are a part of the individual and collective lives of Romanians in both urban and rural areas. The exhibition drew on a collection of photographs taken in north-east Romania between 1999 and 2001 by Gabriel Hanganu, a postgraduate student at the University, and a collection of objects acquired by him for the Museum in 2003 from people who made or used them on a daily basis, or directly from local shops and popular markets. The exhibition opened on 27 September and closed on 20 December 2004.

Plans for a new special exhibition programme are being developed for 2006 and beyond. In relation to this, in August 2004 the Museum was delighted to be awarded £38,000 by the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund for new ‘state-of-the-art’ exhibition cases. Fully demountable, and easily moveable, they will also comply with current health and safety, conservation, access, and security standards.

COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND CAREReserve CollectionsWork on upgrading the conditions in which the collections of pottery held at Osney are kept was completed. Attention then turned to the barkcloth collections, including barkcloth beaters, whose conditions and documentation were upgraded and enhanced during the year. Work was also carried out on the metal vessels held at Osney. In relation to this work, a new locations system was designed and implemented.

At 60 Banbury Road further improvements were made to the arrangement of the stone tool collections, although an enormous amount of further work needs to be done before the Museum can claim that these collections are adequately catalogued and properly stored. An application for funding for a major project to research these collections and make them fully accessible to researchers is being prepared.

AcquisitionsThe most important acquisition this year was the large collection of photographs from the estate of Godfrey Lienhardt, generously donated to the Museum by Dr Ahmed Al-Shahi, the executor of Lienhardt’s literary estate. Lienhardt worked amongst the Dinka and Anuak of the Southern Sudan in the 1950s and his collection complements wonderfully well the Museum’s holdings of earlier photographs taken by Edward Evans-Pritchard among the Zande and Nuer and later photographs taken by Jean Buxton among the Mandari. Lienhardt’s photographs are being catalogued as part of the Museum’s AHRC-funded ‘Southern Sudan’ project and will be made available online in 2006.A list of all the Museum’s acquisitions during the year is given in Annex B.

LoansThe Museum’s loans programme is a valuable part of its work, providing further access to some of its collections both in the United Kingdom and abroad as well as assisting other museums in developing their institutions and audiences. The Museum was particularly pleased to hear that the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby had won the Yorkshire Tourist Board White Rose Award for the best visitor attraction with under 100,000 visitors. Its application focused on its work in 2004 during which, according to the Chairman of the Trustees, the loan exhibition of material from the Pitt Rivers Museum, Curiosities from the Endeavour (with accompanying catalogue and series of events) contributed greatly to its success.

There were two new loans (a total of fourteen artefacts), one to an overseas institution and one to a UK institution, during the year. In September 2004, twelve items relating to tattooing (including two Tahitian objects from the Forster (Cook-voyage) collection) were loaned to the Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels for the exhibition Tatu-Tattoo! and published in the accompanying catalogue; they were returned in February. In June 2005, a Tahitian breast ornament and a Maori hei-tiki from the Banks and Forster collections (both Cook-voyage) were loaned to the National Archives, Kew for the exhibition Captains, Pirates and Castaways: Battles and Voyages of Nelson, Cook and Bligh; they are due to be returned in November 2005.

There were no loans of original material from the photographic collections this year. However, permission was granted for a number of photographs to be reproduced in exhibitions around the world; a form of publishing the collections that seems to be becoming increasingly popular.

A number of outstanding loans were returned during the year. Four artefacts associated with Mary Kingsley and Lady Franklin, loaned to the National Portrait Gallery for the exhibition Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers, were returned in November 2004. Twenty-three Tahitian and Maori artefacts from the Banks (Cook-voyage) collection, loaned to the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby for the exhibition Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection—Pacific Artefacts Given by Joseph Banks to Christ Church, Oxford after the First Voyage, were also returned in November.

The Museum was also pleased this year to be able to accede to requests for loans for 2006–7 from a number of institutions, including the BildMuseet, Umeå University, Sweden; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia; Shipley Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Museums; and the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. Collections and conservation staff devoted many hours to conserving, documenting, researching, photographing, and otherwise preparing this material for loan.

CataloguingWork continued on recataloguing a number of important collections throughout the year. Much of this work was carried out as part of externally funded research projects and is reported on below under the heading ‘Research and Scholarship’. In addition, thanks to support from the James A. Swan Fund in 2003-4, the Museum was able to employ Laura Phillips to complete her recataloguing of the important Edward Dunn collection of stone tools and related ethnographic material from Southern Africa.

During the year significant work was undertaken on improving and updating the photograph and manuscript databases, as well as on addressing the backlog of uncatalogued photographs. For example, the collections of Reginald Schomberg, Mary Durham, Ernest Emley, and the Museum’s 1930s ‘C Series’ were catalogued. In addition, the project supported by the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, former President of the United Arab Emirates, to catalogue Thesiger’s collections came to an end in December 2004, and the resulting 52,700 record entries were added to the photograph database. Thanks to support from William Delafield, the results of this project were publicly displayed in the exhibition Wilfred Thesiger’s Iraq 1949–1958: Photographs of Travel at Lacock Abbey (August to October 2004) and the Pitt Rivers Museum (January 2005 to March 2006).

A number of amendments were made to the databases during the year. In particular, it was decided to replace the unwieldy ‘Notes’ field on both the object and photograph databases with a number of separate fields devoted to, among other things, primary documentation, display history, and publication history. Efforts to retrospectively amend the existing records to take account of these changes were begun this year but will continue for some time. More generally, 3,920 new entries were added to the database for the object collections during the year, while 39,683 enhancements were made to the records. At the same time, 55,959 new entries were added to the database for the photograph collections, while 46,142 enhancements were made to the records. The large number of new records on the photograph collections database is due in large part to the importation of the records for the Thesiger collection. The total number of records on the two main databases now stands at 204,011 for objects and 119,247 for photographs. The large number of enhancements on both databases is due to a number of factors, including the ‘splitting’ of the ‘Notes’ field, the work carried out by the DCF-funded ‘What’s Upstairs?’ team, and—last, but not least—the sterling efforts of many members of staff to continually improve (or ‘clean’) the records for the benefit of Museum staff, visiting researchers, and the wider public who, of course, continue to have access to the online versions of the databases. These figures do not, however, include all the work carried out this year on externally funded projects, much of which was carried out on ‘clone’ databases that will, however, be incorporated into the main databases in due course.

ConservationThe most significant development in the conservation section this year was the appointment of Gali Beiner to the team from November 2004. Her appointment brought the department up to full strength for the first time since March 2003 and provides the Museum with much needed specialist knowledge of the conservation of inorganic materials.

As expected, much time was taken up with preparations for the building works. At the design stage conservation staff tried to formulate a clear and precise brief for a range of services for the new extension by thinking of the building as a whole and not as a set of individual departments. This work led to the proposal, supported by data, to improve the environmental conditions in the main museum. While this was agreed in principle, financial constraints means that the implementation of the necessary improvements will have to wait until a later date.

Preparations for the care and safety of objects during the building works began in earnest in December when the conservation team started to remove from display some 1700 objects as well as securing many others. All the displays were recorded and photographed before the objects were packed and stored to enable them to be reinstalled as swiftly and easily as possible. Further preparations for the reopening have included the compilation of a long list of objects on open display on the galleries (and in the court), many of which will be in need of cleaning following the current period of restricted access. Shock, vibration, and dust monitoring was carried out by both the Museum’s conservators and the building contractors, Sir Robert McAlpine, and this will continue throughout the building work.

The annual pest surveys on all the Museum’s sites showed very little new insect damage, suggesting that the Museum’s treatment of incoming collections, as part of its pest- management procedures, is effective. In the textile store, the pest survey was combined with a programme to upgrade conditions: individual textiles were refolded where appropriate and potentially damaging tie-on labels replaced with sew-on labels. In addition, the contents lists of individual cabinets were upgraded and locations added to the database records.Conservation staff evaluated 42 objects requested for loan to other institutions (see ‘Loans’ above for details). In all, 497 objects were treated in the laboratory. In relation to this, 1985 enhancements were made to the records on the database.

As usual, members of the conservation team continued to host research visits, carry out their own research, and provide support for other research projects within and beyond the Museum. This year this work included checking the condition, prior to photography, of some 1100 objects from Southern Sudan as well as dealing with a number of objects brought to the attention of conservation staff by the team working on the DCF-funded ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project.

Members of the conservation team continued to contribute to the teaching and training activities of the Museum through the provision of sessions on ‘Conservation and Artefact Handling’ for the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography students and for Museum staff, as well as through public lectures and guided tours. Overall this year there were 242 visitors to the conservation laboratory, in addition to the 387 children participating in the ‘Making Museums’ sessions organized by the education service.

There were two conservation interns during the year: Sehee Park from University College London and Wendy Hickson from the University of Southampton, both of whom made major contributions to the work of the department over several months.Designation Challenge Fund: ‘What’ s Upstairs?’

Following the success of the ‘Court Project’, the Museum applied to the Designation Challenge Fund to continue the same approach on the upper floors of the Museum. The application for this project, entitled ‘What’s Upstairs?’, was successful and the project commenced in September 2004 with the aim of working through all the displays and storage in the galleries, improving cataloguing and developing interpretation. The artefact team, consisting of Laura Philips, Elin Bornemann, and Emily Stokes-Rees, aimed to locate, number, measure, and improve the database entries for all the display and reserve objects on the galleries. In addition the team have been taking digital photographs of all the artefacts worked on to create a significant new resource for Museum staff. As in the ‘Court Project’, while the lower gallery was open to the public, the team worked behind Perspex screens, enabling them to work on collections during opening hours while allowing members of the public to see them in action.

In February 2005, the project plan had to be amended as not only were the galleries now closed to the public and the internal staircase out of use, but Emily Stokes-Rees left for maternity leave. However, with the help of Naomi Bergmans as maternity cover and in spite of difficult working conditions, by the end of July 2005 the team had completed work on 8,816 objects on display and 23,327 objects on reserve, making a total of more than 32,000 artefacts processed in less than a year. The success of this part of the project has been greatly assisted by the efforts of the Museum’s ICT Officer and those of conservation and technical services staff, as well as collections staff.

A second component of the ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project has focused on the production of new collections-based interpretation for the displays on the lower gallery. Bryony Reid led this work as Senior Project Officer (Interpretation). She developed a strategy reflecting the interests of existing visitors and identifying new ways of responding to the needs of the target audiences (young adults aged 16 to 24, and young families). Amongst other forms of evaluation, focus groups were organized by Bryony and Kate White which have given us insights into visitors’ needs and preferences. Based on this feedback from visitors, Bryony is developing additional aids to interpretation. By the end of July 2005 Bryony had compiled 105 short, in-case texts, seven fact-sheets for the web and for gallery use, 200 accessible object captions for a new on-line gallery, and 40 new audio entries. Orientation developments have also progressed with the installation of individual case-headers and a numbering system to aid case identification.

RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIPMembers of the Museum’s staff continue to be involved in numerous research projects, both within and beyond the Museum. Some idea of the range of this work can be gained from the individual entries in Annex D: Staff Activities and Annex E: Staff Publications, as well as from Annex F: Museum Seminars.

Research ProjectsResearch is an integral part of many aspects of the Museum’s work, ranging from that carried out with the aid of externally funded projects to the detailed investigations that are carried out as part of accessioning procedures and cataloguing (see above). Much of the Museum’s activity in this area was again focused on the projects funded by the major research grants successfully applied for in recent years that enable the institution to stay at the cutting edge of contemporary, particularly collections-based, research. This section introduces just some of the major research carried out by Museum staff during the year.

In October 2002 Chris Gosden and Mike O’Hanlon were awarded £326,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council for ‘The Relational Museum’, a project that will run until March 2006. The project explores the history of the Museum’s collections between 1884, when the Museum was founded, and 1945, the start of the post-colonial period. This year the work of the project researchers Alison Petch and Frances Larson focused on the lives and collections of the project’s six ‘representative’ collectors (General Pitt Rivers, E. B. Tylor, Henry Balfour, C. G. Seligman, J. H. Hutton, and Beatrice Blackwood). A series of papers were prepared for publication and a contract agreed with Oxford University Press for the project monograph. On 14–16 April 2005, a project symposium was held at the Museum. Entitled ‘Networks, Nodes, and Pathways: Understanding and Activating Museum Histories’, this attracted participants from around the world.

Another major research project, funded by a grant of £224,668 to Jeremy Coote and Elizabeth Edwards from the Resource Enhancement Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, began on 1 October 2003. Entitled ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’, the project focuses on the Museum’s rich collections from an area of central importance for social and cultural anthropology in general, and British anthropology in particular, through the work of a number of individuals including especially the Oxford anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard. During the lifetime of the twenty-seven month project each of the 1,200+ objects and 5,000+ photographs in the collection will be catalogued or recatalogued, incorporating detailed descriptions and taking full account of existing documentation, and digital images of all objects created. At the end of the project, the material created, including related biographical and cultural databases, will be made available online. During this reporting period 664 objects and 6,974 photographs were fully catalogued by the project researchers Rachael Sparks and Chris Morton. In addition, more than 2,500 digital images of objects were created and 3,773 photographs scanned and a further 1,142 scans ‘optimized’. In addition, reports on the project were presented to members of the ‘North East Africa’ seminar at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, and at ‘Protecting and Conserving the Cultural Heritage of South Sudan: Defining Priorities for Action’ a workshop held in Nairobi under the joint sponsorship of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the British Council, and the British Museum. As an adjunct to this work, Gilbert Oteyo was commissioned to recatalogue the remainder of the photographs taken among the Luo of Kenya held by the Museum and to survey Evans-Pritchard’s ‘Southern Sudan’ photographs for ‘stray’ Luo photographs. Mr Oteyo had previously been employed to make a study of the Museum’s collection of Luo ornaments and of Evans-Pritchard’s Luo photographs. He was thus able to make important cross-references between the object and photograph collections as well as supplying rich contextual information for addition to the Museum’s records. The Museum is extremely appreciative of Mr Oteyo’s contribution to its work.

Following the completion of a pilot project funded by the University of Oxford’s Research and Development Fund, Elizabeth Edwards, Clare Harris, and Richard Blurton (of the British Museum) were awarded £238,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Board for ‘Tibet Visual History On-line, 1920–1950’. This project focuses on the history and ongoing significance of photographs from 1920 to 1950 as a record of Tibet prior to the Chinese occupation. The project began in May 2004 and is scheduled to be completed in October 2006. Tsering Shakya joined the team in October 2004 and spent the year working on the photographic collection of the renowned Tibetologist Hugh Richardson. In November Toby Wilkinson also joined the team as Technician with primary responsibility for digitizing the collections. By the time he left the project in May, some 90% of the collections had been digitally recorded to the highest standards set by the grant givers, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and their advisers, the Arts and Humanities Data Service. Mandy Sadan continued her work on the collections of Sir Charles Bell and Frederick Spencer Chapman. She has worked on developing metadata standards for the project as a whole and on upgrading and enhancing the database to make it a more effective, image-led, research tool. Collaboration with the British Museum continued to develop positively with the photographic department there digitizing an important album of images. Fruitful discussions have been held with the British Museum’s IT department concerning the provision of access to the project’s outputs as a high-profile ‘Kiosk’ resource within the British Museum in 2006. As part of the project’s web-development strategy, work was begun on developing workshops and focus groups for soliciting feedback.

In May 2005 David Harris took up the part-time post of ICT Projects Officer, to work with members of the ‘Relational Museum’, ‘Sudan’, and ‘Tibet’ project teams to develop the web-based resources that will form such a large part of the projects’ outputs. The Museum is grateful to the AHRC for allowing the ‘rejigging’ of project grants and time-tables to make this exciting and extremely valuable cross-project appointment possible. The results of all three projects should be available online by the end of 2006.

Research VisitorsThere were 318 recorded research visits to the Museum during the year requiring the retrieval of material from the reserve collections. Of these, 145 were to the object collections and 173 to the photographic and manuscript collections (282 study days). These visits were made by both UK (188) and overseas (82) researchers. The total number of recorded research enquiries dealt with by Museum staff was 2,612. Of these 1,755 were by email, 440 by phone, 209 by post or fax, and 208 in person. This total is a slight increase (1.8%) on the previous year, and occurs despite a fall in the number of enquiries to the collections section while they are away from the main Museum. The increase may also be due to more efficient data collection by Museum staff.

Teaching and ExaminingThe Museum’s research and scholarship shapes and influences the teaching that members of staff carry out as part of their University duties. Museum staff continue to teach on the University’s undergraduate degrees in Archaeology & Anthropology, Human Sciences, Modern History, and Geography; on the M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography; and variously for M.Sc., M.Phil., and D.Phil. students reading Social Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, History of Art and Visual Culture, Archaeology, and Music. During the course of the year, Museum staff gave 171 University lectures and 570 seminars and tutorials. Details of the teaching and examining carried out by individual members of staff are given in Annex D: Staff Activities.

Balfour LibraryThe year was dominated by the library’s move in September 2004 to grandiose but temporary accommodation in the Old Boys’ School on George Street. This facilitated major reordering of the collection to eliminate the bulk of out-of-sequence sections prior to the move into the new extension at the main Museum site in 2006. In addition, preparations were made to introduce the Oxford Libraries Information System circulation module to the library. This will allow readers to self-issue books and will automate much of the day-to-day record- keeping. This is due to be instituted in early September 2005. A total of 4,812 books were borrowed during the course of the year, a small increase on the total of 4,648 for the previous year.

PADMACThe PADMAC Unit, for the study of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts from deposits mapped as Clay-with-flints, is located at 60 Banbury Road and continues to be administered through the Museum. It is a multi-disciplined, geo-archaeological unit specializing in geology, sedimentology, pedology, lithic-artefact technology, landscape archaeology, and spatial analysis, which offers students and researchers an opportunity to apply geological/sedimentological techniques and thinking in the context of the earliest evidence of human occupation of Britain (around 600,000 to 40,000 years ago) through the study of the deposits mapped as ‘Clay-with-flints’ and associated Palaeolithic artefacts. These deposits cap the downlands of southern England from Devon in the west to Kent in the east. Included in the field investigations undertaken by the unit are geophysical surveys employing resistivity, magnetometry, and magnetic susceptibility techniques. GPS and micro- topographic survey techniques are also deployed and developed in order to identify and map subtle landscape features for inclusion in the unit’s GIS databases. Where appropriate this geophysical data is made available to local archaeological groups.

The extensive and varied fieldwork undertaken by the unit during the year included long-term research projects at the unit’s teaching site at Dickett’s Field, Yarnhams Farm, Hampshire and at Rookery Farm, Lower Kingswood, Surrey (in conjunction with Surrey Archaeological Society’s ‘Plateau Group’). In July 2005 the unit was granted permission by Reigate and Banstead Borough Council to access data appertaining to the Rookery Farm landfill site. An analysis of these data should provide information regarding the geology and geomorphology in the immediate area and the effects (if any) of the landfill construction on the Palaeolithic site at Rookery Farm. The unit has also started to re-evaluate Palaeolithic findspots/sites on the Hampshire Downs and to assess artefacts assigned to Dummer (Dummer, Dummer Breach, and Dummer Clump) and Winslade (Swallick and Buckshorn Copse) held in the ‘Willis Old Collection’ curated by Hampshire County Council Museums Service.

FINANCIAL SUCCESSThe Museum continued to enjoy success in obtaining the external project and research-grant funding so crucial to its financial health.Project GrantsAndy McLellan received further funding from ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ to enable him to continue to take a lead in the development of a regional education policy. The Museum was awarded £134,000 from the MLA Designation Challenge Fund for ‘What’s Upstairs?’, a project to improve visitors’ experience of the galleries of the Museum. The Museum was awarded two further grants by the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund: £36,800 for the purchase of new, state-of-the-art cases for the temporary exhibition programme, and £70,125 for the purchase and renovation of cases at the intersection of the existing galleries and the new extension. The PADMAC Unit received continued funding from BHR Group. This year, £60,327 was received towards running costs, as well as separate grants of £8,000 to fund GIS development by Oxford ArchDigital Ltd and £16,000 towards the development and maintenance of the unit’s Palaeolithic spatial database.

Research GrantsThe following new research grants were obtained during the year: Laura Peers was awarded £40,165 by the Leverhulme Trust for work on the Beechey–Belcher collection from the Arctic, and £4,165 by the British Academy for fieldwork at historic sites in North America during the summer of 2005; John Hobart was awarded £3,611 from the British Academy to continue his anthropological fieldwork in Lesotho. In addition, Christopher Morton was appointed to a three-year Career Development Fellowship in association with Linacre College to carry out research on the E. E. Evans-Pritchard photograph collection, as well as to contribute to the Museum’s teaching and collections management. This position is funded by the University through the Academic Services and University Collections Division.

Museum Shop and other Trading ActivitiesThe Museum shop and its staff had a very difficult year, with the departure of the shop supervisor and consequent adjustments to the staffing structure. In addition, as a result of the building works, the shop had to be moved to a new, and unfortunately smaller, location. This has required a reduction in the area available for display and for storage for stock. As a result, for the first time, shop income, of £45,000, failed to meet expenditure, of £49,500. Since January, shop staff have worked hard to reduce the existing shop stock by half and to reassess the products on sale. In consequence, the shop is in a much stronger position and on course to contribute to the Museum’s finances next year.

The sale of publications did not contribute significantly to the Museum’s finances this year. Income of £3,060 was offset by the costs of producing a new edition of Julia Cousins’s ‘souvenir guide’ to the Museum. Income from facilities hire did increase, however, by 28% to £1,025, and this despite the closure of the two galleries. In the main this increase was due to income from events organized jointly with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Photographic orders also increased significantly (from £5,295 to £25,680). This was due mainly to the sale of prints of photographs by Wilfred Thesiger in association with the Museum’s special exhibition. As a result, the Museum was able to take on a full-time photographic assistant and to purchase some much needed photographic equipment. Finally, income from the collection box remained steady at £5,295, a figure that really does not reflect the numbers of visitors to the Museum each year.

ACQUISITIONSPurchasesTen early twentieth-century postcards from Asia, North Africa, and North America (2004.171); a screenprint by Bharti Parmar (2004.188); four digital prints by Gonkar Gyatso (2005.64).

STAFF ACTIVITIES (INCLUDING TEACHING AND EXAMINING)Jeremy Coote continued to support a number of Museum-based research projects, as well as directing, with Elizabeth Edwards, the project ‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board’s Resource Enhancement Scheme. Throughout the year he continued his researches into the history of the Museum’s early collections. To this end he visited institutions holding relevant artefact and/or manuscript collections, including this year the National Maritime Museum (NMM), Greenwich. During the year, and in collaboration with the NMM, he lectured on the Museum’s ethnographic collections from Cook’s voyages at ‘Maritime Discovery and Exploration’ at Christ Church, Oxford, and participated in ‘Collecting Artefacts, Acquiring Empire: A Maritime Endeavour’, held at and organized by the NMM in association with the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum. In January, he co-hosted with the conservation section a ‘behind-the-scenes’ visit for the Friends of the Museum to the reserve collection of material from Cook’s voyages. In February he attended a seminar organized by the Arts and Humanities Research Board on ‘Researchers and the Cultural Sector’. In May he attended the Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG) annual conference in Manchester and was elected to the MEG Committee. Through the year he contributed regularly to a number of internet discussion lists, particularly those devoted to African arts (‘H.Afr.Arts’), and Captain Cook. He refereed grant applications for the AHRC and papers for academic journals. He continued to serve as an editor of JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford and as an associate member of the research group ‘Anthropologie, Objets et Esthétiques’ of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; he also served on a sub-committee set up to consider the future of the Museum Ethnographers Group’s Journal of Museum Ethnography and was later appointed as Chair of its Editorial Board. He gave talks about the Museum and its work to students from the universities of Oxford, Manchester, and East Anglia, supervised two doctoral students (one of whom successfully submitted during the year), served as assessor for a number of others, and gave occasional tutorials to undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology.

Elizabeth Edwards continued to serve on the editorial boards of History of Photography, Visual Studies, Visual Anthropology Review, The Oxford Companion to the Photograph, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Material Religion. She continued to serve19on the Photographic Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Committee for National Photograph Collections and to hold a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of the Arts London (London Institute). She was appointed to a photographic project advisory panel at the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, Bristol and served on the committee for the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival. She gave invited papers at the Carpenter Centre for Visual Arts/Fogg Museum, Harvard University (where she also carried out research in the collections of the Peabody Museum), the Association of Art Historians conference in Bristol, and a seminar at Tate Modern. She delivered public lectures in connection with the exhibition Fiona Tan: Countenance at Modern Art Oxford and on Wilfred Thesiger’s Iraq, 1949–1958: Photographs of Travel (for the Friends of the Museum). She was on the panel of judges for the Open University/Independent Newspaper Social Photography competition. She continued to co-convene and teach the M.Sc. in Visual Anthropology and to give lectures and classes in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. She supervised four undergraduate dissertations, one M.Phil. and a post- graduate dissertation in Refugee Studies, as well as co-supervising three doctoral students. She acted as assessor for the M.Sc. in Visual Anthropology and for dissertations in Refugee Studies, completed her stint as external examiner for the M.A. in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and continued to be in demand as an external supervisor for M.Phil. and Ph.D. students in other universities. She examined one doctoral thesis for the University of London. She refereed for the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Australian Research Council, the Getty Trust, and for two tenure-track boards in the USA, as well as for numerous journals and publishers. In May she left the Museum after more than twenty years to become Professor and Senior Research Fellow in the Cultural History of Photography at the University of the Arts London.

Chris Gosden continued as the British editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology (Sage), Executive Editor of World Archaeology, and continued to sit on the editorial boards of Archaeology in Oceania, World Archaeology, and Ethnograpisch-Archäologishe Zeitschrift. During July he excavated (with Gary Lock) at the Romano-British site of Marcham, south Oxfordshire. He gave a paper at a conference on the History of Mind in Aarhus, Denmark. He was on the panel to judge the Leverhulme Prize in Anthropology. With Luke Treadwell and Eleanor Robson, he ran a seminar series in St Cross and All Soul’s colleges entitled ‘Who Owns Objects: The Ethics and Legality of Collecting’. He gave a series of three lectures at the Department of Anthropology, University of Minneapolis, as well as a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society, Hong Kong, and the key-note address at a conference on Archaeology and Colonialism held in Okayama, Japan. He was chair of a review committee on the Diploma of Professional Archaeology, Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford. He gave seminars on the ‘Relational Museum’ project at Senate House, University College London and at the universities of Manchester and Cambridge, as well as at the project symposium held at the Museum. He gave a paper on the links between archaeology and anthropology at a conference in Cambridge. He gave a paper on Celtic Art at a one-day meeting on Iron Age Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He was a member of the Steering Group for the AHRC initiative on ‘Interactive Mind’. With Michael O’Hanlon he was consulted over future directions at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He was a member of the International Advisory Committee for the Humanities Institute of Ireland. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. This year he served as Chair of the University’s School of Archaeology. His teaching commitments included lectures and tutorials in ‘Material Culture, Art, and Society’, ‘The Nature of Archaeological Enquiry’, ‘Landscape Archaeology’, and ‘Material Culture in Melanesia’. He was an examiner for the Final Honours School in Archaeology and Anthropology and acted as an external examiner in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Manchester. He examined five Ph.Ds. and supervised fourteen D.Phil. students in archaeology and anthropology.

Clare Harris gave invited lectures at the British Museum’s Centre for Anthropology, at a conference on contemporary art from Tibet at the Lha Tse Institute, New York (which she also chaired), at a day school on mountain cultures at Rewley House, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. As a member of the advisory panel for Mechak (an international organization established to promote contemporary Tibetan art) she attended the opening of an exhibition organized by Mechak at Tibet House, New York. She also attended a special viewing of the exhibition on the Dalai Lamas at the Zurich Ethnographic Museum in the presence of the fourteenth Dalai Lama. She attended conferences in Cambridge and Oxford. She hosted research visits to the Museum and gave talks at the Museum for students from Lugano (Switzerland), the Berlin Ethnographic Museum, and the British Museum’s Asian Art course. She continued to serve on the editorial boards of Art History and Ethnos and joined the MLA-funded specialist subject network for the Himalayas and Tibet. In June she took over as primary manager of the ‘Tibet Visual History’ project. In the 2005 Easter break she worked with her Mumbai-based co-editor Monisha Ahmed on their forthcoming book about art and material culture in north west India. She continued to give lectures, tutorials, and seminars for undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology, as well as for postgraduates in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and Visual Anthropology. She supervised undergraduate dissertations and postgraduate theses. She was course co- ordinator for the M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, director of studies for Archaeology and Anthropology at Magdalen College, ran the ‘Cultural Representations’ lecture series, the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series in Hilary term, and taught the postgraduate option in ‘Key Debates in the Anthropology of Art’. She served as Examiner for the M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, and in Social Anthropology, and assessed two doctorates, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the University of the Arts London.

Hélene La Rue continued to work on the Museum’s music collections as time allowed, contributing in particular this year to the detailed cataloguing work of the AHRC-funded ‘Southern Sudan’ project and to the development of the Museum’s new audio guide as part of the DCF-funded ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project. She continued to support the gamelan, tabla, and bagpipe sessions held at the Balfour Galleries throughout the year. In December she attended the seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations of the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo and gave a keynote address. She continued to serve as assessor for the Music degree and for the graduate M.Phil. and M.Sc. degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and in Michaelmas term organized, with Laura Peers, the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series. Over the course of the year she delivered forty-four lectures, gave more than fifty tutorials, and supervised six D.Phil. students as well as examining a doctoral thesis for Goldsmiths College, University of London and a graduate thesis for the University of Malta.

Andrew McLellan continued to manage a growing Education Service, and to represent education in all the University’s museums on the University’s Committee for Museums and Scientific Collections. Along with education officers from the Ashmolean, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and the Museum for the History of Science he continued the collaborative process of developing a joint education service across the museums.

Peter Mitchell organized the tenth annual Archaeology & Anthropology Open Day and also co-ordinated similar events in conjunction with the University-wide Science Open Days in June and September. He continued to serve on the Council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and on the editorial boards of Antiquity, African Archaeological Review, Before Farming, Journal of African History, South African Archaeological Bulletin, Southern African Humanities, and World Archaeology, and as President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists. He was also elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He spoke in a seminar series on the African past at the Institute of Archaeology, London, took up an appointment as external examiner for the Department of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool, examined a graduate thesis for the University of Helsinki, and acted as co-editor of a major book series on Peoples and Cultures of Africa designed for the American high school market. He taught for the Honour Schools of Archaeology & Anthropology and Human Sciences, as well as supervising one graduate student for the M.St. in World Archaeology and four doctoral research students in African archaeology. He acted as an assessor for both Honour Schools and as an examiner for the M.St. and M.Phil. degrees in European Archaeology, Landscape Archaeology, and World Archaeology.Julia Nicholson worked on the Museum’s application for Accreditation and developed the draft policy and planning documents required for accredited status. Following the successful application to the Designation Challenge Fund for the ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project she oversaw its implementation and submitted further grant applications to complete the cataloguing and photography of every artefact on display and on reserve on all three floors of the Museum. In addition, she gave a number of talks and introductions to the collections, including sessions on the recently acquired Gigi Crocker-Jones collection and an introduction to female textile and costume collectors for International Women’s Day.

Michael O’Hanlon spent much of this year, like last, in discussion and planning in relation to the Museum’s new extension, due to be handed over in 2006. Along with the Ashmolean’s Deputy Director, Professor Mayhew, he continued to lead for the University in connection with the government’s ‘Renaissance in the Regions’ programme. Along with two other international authorities, he was asked to review Zurich University’s ethnographic museum, and along with Chris Gosden, he was consulted over future directions at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In the Spring he sat on the board for selecting the new Keeper for Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the British Museum. He continued to serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Material Culture. With Museum colleagues, he ran, at the Museum, an international symposium in connection with the Museum’s major ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project. He lectured on the postgraduate degrees in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and continued to supervise his remaining D.Phil. student.

Laura Peers continued her research into the Hopkins and Pope collections from North America at the Museum, with a special focus on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century quillwork pieces. She was awarded a fieldwork grant by the British Academy and a grant of £40,000 from the Leverhulme Trust for work on the Beechey–Belcher collection from the Arctic. She undertook consultancy work with the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum and with the Museum in the Park, Stroud. She continued her work as a consultant to the Department of Culture Media and Sport on the development of the guidelines on human remains. She served as a reviewer for the Canada Foundation for Innovation. In May she gave a joint paper with her student Amber Lincoln at ‘Collecting Artefacts, Acquiring Empire: A Maritime Endeavour’, a research workshop held at and organized by the National Maritime Museum in association with the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum. Also in May she lectured in the ‘History Now!’ series at the British Empire and spoke on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Woman’s Hour’ on ‘Female Artefacts’. In Michaelmas term she organized, with Hélène La Rue, the Museum’s Friday lunchtime seminar series. Her other teaching commitments included tutoring, lecturing, and examining undergraduates in Archaeology & Anthropology and graduate students studying Visual Anthropology and Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography.

Alison Petch continued to work as Senior Researcher on the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’ project, and as Museum Registrar. In April she attended and spoke at ‘Networks, Nodes, and Pathways: Understanding and Activating Museum Histories’, the ‘Relational Museum’ project’s symposium, held at the Museum. In May she attended the Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG) annual conference in Manchester, where she spoke, with Frances Larson, about the ‘Relational Museum’ project. In October, she attended ‘Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts in Ethnographic Perspective’ at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. In addition, over the course of the year she gave presentations to Museum and university staff and visiting students about the Museum and its history. She continued to serve as a co-opted member of the committee of the Museum Ethnographers Group and served on a sub-committee set up to consider the future of the Group’s Journal of Museum Ethnography.

Heather Richardson assisted with conservation and artefact-handling training for members of Museum staff, students on the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography course, and conservation interns from other institutions. In September she attended a workshop at Birmingham Museum on the ‘Identification of Bone, Horn, Ivory and Antler’, and in May, she attended a seminar at the Museum of Welsh Life, St Fagans, Cardiff on ‘Questioning the Boundaries of Ethnography’; both of which were organized through the Ethnography Section of the United Kingdom Institute of Conservation. In April she attended in London a Museum’s Association seminar on ‘Emergency Planning’. In July she attended a three-day conference in Winchester entitled ‘The Future of the Twentieth Century: Collecting, Interpreting & Conserving Modern Materials’.

Julie Scott-Jackson continued as Director of the PADMAC Unit and supervised the Unit’s fieldwork and research programmes. She continued as Palaeolithic geo-archaeological advisor and committee member of the Avebury Archaeological and Historical Research Group for the Avebury World Heritage Site (English Heritage) and as advisor to various local archaeological groups. She directed extensive programmes of fieldwork, including excavations, investigations, and geophysical surveys at the Palaeolithic sites of Rookery Farm, Lower Kingswood (Surrey), and Dickett’s Field, Yarnhams Farm (Hampshire). Alongside post-excavation analyses she began work in the latter part of the year on a paper that addresses the geo-archaeology of the Rookery Farm site and a joint paper on spatial analysis of the Dickett’s field artefact locations. Also, with reference to the Museum’s collection of Palaeolithic artefacts she continued preparing for publication, a ‘Gazetteer of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Artefacts Found in Relation to Deposits Mapped as Clay- with-flints on Chalk Downlands of Southern England’. During the year she attended five conferences and seminars devoted to aspects of Quaternary research and Palaeolithic discoveries, and gave presentations on her research to Wessex Archaeology and the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. She continued her collaborative research with colleagues from: the Archaeometry Unit of Daresbury Laboratories in Warrington; University College, London; BRGM, Orleans, France; and the British Geological Survey at Keyworth. Throughout the year she supervised the work of D.Phil. student Alice Thomas and directed the research of the PADMAC Unit’s Associate Research Fellows.

Birgitte Speake organized and supervised sessions on conservation and artefact-handling for Museum staff, graduate students on the Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography course, and conservation interns. In September she attended a workshop at Birmingham Museum on the ‘Identification of Bone, Horn, Ivory and Antler’, organized through the Ethnography Section of the United Kingdom Institute of Conservation. She also attended a symposium on conservation organized by the V&A and held at the Royal College of Arts, the conference ‘Dress and Jewellery’ at the V&A, a conference at the AHRC Research Centre for Textile Conservation and Textile Studies, and ‘Dust to Dust: Science, Perception and Management of Historic Interiors’ at the British Library.

Kate White continued to serve on a number of national and regional committees and groups, including the Museums Association’s Ethics Committee, the Oxford Evolving Cities programme, Oxford Inspires, and the Oxford Cultural Marketing Group, as well as providing maternity cover as the Museums Association’s regional representative for the South East. She helped organize the annual Museums and Galleries Marketing day at the British Library, and attended seminars on ‘Inspiring Learning for All’ (Renaissance in the Regions); on sponsorship, run by Arts & Business; and ‘Access Auditing and the Disability Discrimination Act’ presented by the Centre for Accessible Environments. Within the Museum she produced a new disability audit, policy, and action plan for the Museum itself and the new extension; developed an outline for Positive Action Traineeship (under the Museums Association’s ‘Diversify’ scheme); worked on the Museum’s application for Accreditation; and oversaw the interpretation element of the DCF-funded ‘What’s Upstairs?’ project, supporting Bryony Reid in the development of the initial strategy, and helping with the focus groups and the development of the audio guide.

JAMES A. SWAN FUNDThe Pitt Rivers Museum sponsors archaeological and anthropological fieldwork within areas of interest to the late James A. Swan, including the Later Stone Age prehistory of southern Africa and the study of the contemporary Bushman and Pygmy peoples of Africa. Research on museum collections relating to these fields may also be supported, as may the costs of publishing the results of fieldwork that has been aided by the Fund. During 2004–5 the Fund was not open for applications in order to allow it to recover from depreciation due to the weakness of the Rand.

FRIENDS OF THE PITT RIVERS MUSEUM REPORT BY LIZ YARDLEY (SECRETARY)This year was one of many celebrations, starting with a very striking and much-applauded venture into colour production for the special anniversary issue of the Newsletter in October 2004. Marking both twenty years since the Friends’ foundation and the fiftieth issue of the Newsletter, the twenty-page issue included articles by our distinguished patrons, a time-line recalling significant Museum and Friends’ events, and a delightful portrait of Mike O’Hanlon by Kaipel Ka, a Wahgi shield-painter from Papua New Guinea. Many thanks are due to the retiring editor Carol Quarini and her team, of Julia Cousins, Felicity Wood, Deborah Manley, Linda Teasdale, and Liz Yardley, and to all the local businesses who most generously sponsored the additional cost of producing an extended issue in colour by taking advertising space. (By July it had been decided to produce every issue of the Newsletter in colour, a decision that it is hoped will help to attract new Friends.) The Friends also sponsored the

31production of a set of special note-cards with designs from paintings of the Museum’s displays by David Paskett, as well as designing and printing ‘Only a Spear’s Throw Away’, a map for visitors of places to eat near the Museum. Both the note-cards and the map are available from the Museum shop

The special ‘Celebrate!’ party just before Christmas attracted a large number of Friends and their friends and families. It was especially pleasing to see so many children enjoying the festivities, which is surely a mark of the success of the education services’ programme of Pitt Stops and Family Friendly activities. Both young and not-so-young enjoyed drinks, canapés, and a performance of Egyptian dance by Katrina Robinson, as well as having the chance to view the architects’ model of and plans for the new extension.

The programme of lectures and events began in October with Andrew Sherratt of the Ashmolean Museum revealing a new slant on archaeological clues with ‘Satellite Images: The New World of Maps’. This was followed in November by Chris Gosden and Gary Lock (Institute of Archaeology) with an update on the undergraduate training dig’s summer activities in ‘Bringing together the Evidence: The Romano-British Site of Marcham/Frilford’. Barbara Isaac’s programme for the new year began with Betsy Schneider from Arizona State University speaking on ‘Photography of the Body’ in early January, followed later in the month by a privileged view of ‘Curiosities from the Endeavour’ with Jeremy Coote, Birgitte Speake, and Heather Richardson, when Friends were able to see the recently discovered collection of Maori and Tahitian artefacts acquired by Joseph Banks on Cook’s first Pacific voyage, as well as enjoying a tot of rum and ships’ biscuits! In February, Celia Nyamweru from St Lawrence University, New York, gave an illustrated talk on ‘Ugandan Bark Cloth: An Ancient Craft in Modern Times’, and in May Elizabeth Edwards gave a gallery talk on the Thesiger exhibition

The Kenneth Kirkwood Memorial Fund study day ‘Images and Objects’ was devoted to visual anthropology. The distinguished speakers were Zuleika Kingdon, giving ‘A Film- maker’s Perspective on Working with a Community’; Jeremy McClancey asking ‘What Can Museums do for Anthropology and What can Anthropology do for Museums?’; Elizabeth Edwards giving a master-class on the interpretation of photographs with ‘The Thingness of Photographs’, and Paul Henley asking ‘What can Film do for Anthropology?’. Grateful thanks are due to the Said Business School for providing the venue for what was a most enjoyable day.

In May, the disappointment of having to postpone this year’s Beatrice Blackwood Lecture, when Simon McBurney was taken ill the night before he was due to speak, was ameliorated by the success of the Friends’ contribution to the Museum’s events during Museums and Galleries Month. The Friends’ sponsorship of publicity materials helped to ensure a huge audience for the truly memorable ‘In a Different Light’ event, while—having learnt from the previous year not to plan anything on Cup Final Day—the Friends’ tours of ‘Objects of Desire: The Art of Collecting’ attracted more than 100 participants, with the feed- back board for the public’s favourite objects awash with more than 400 cards.

At the AGM in June, Chairman Richard Briant thanked all Council members for their hard work during the year, Felicity Wood and Deborah Manley for guest editing the January and April issues of the Newsletter, and Shahin Bekhradnia for organizing the study day. Contributions from the Friends to the Museum totalled £3,833 this year. Adrienne Hopkins and Liz Yardley retired by rotation as Membership Secretary and Secretary respectively; Margaret Dyke was elected Secretary and Ann Kingston-Jones as Membership Secretary. Adam Butcher kindly agreed to take on the editorship of the Newsletter.

The AGM was followed by an inspiring presentation on ‘Extending the Museum’ from Mike O’Hanlon, following which the Friends attending agreed to support finding the matching funding required for the new and reconstructed display cases, for the filling of which Friends’ patron Michael Palin has most generously sponsored a year’s salary for a display technician.

The final celebration of the year followed the news that the Pitt Rivers and the Museum of Natural History had together won the ‘Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award 2005’. For the Friends who volunteer for the Museum’s Family Friendly and other activities, and thus know at first hand what a wonderful job the education service does in attracting family audiences from all walks of life, it was both a special thrill and a welcome confirmation of what we have always known!